Beyond Fearless (2 page)

WITH THE SUN
hovering just above the ocean's western horizon, the alley was shady and cool, a relief from the heat of the Caribbean day.

Yet as Anna Ridgeway hurried along the cobblestone passage between the pastel green, blue, and yellow buildings of Palmiro, she felt the fine hairs on her arms prickle.

She'd thought she'd found a refuge on Grand Fernandino—five hundred miles from the mainland United States. Now she suspected that danger had followed her from Denver.

Her eyes probed the shadows for signs of anyone following—or someone who had circled around and gotten in front of her.

The sights and sounds of the port city enveloped her. No one who lived in the old quarter had air-conditioning. That modern luxury was only available in the high-rise hotels along the strip of sand known as Five Mile Beach or at some of the bed-and-breakfast inns dotting the city and the surrounding hills.

Through open doorways and windows along the alley, she glimpsed rooms with five beds crowded together; heard voices speaking in a mixture of French, Spanish, and English; and smelled the aroma of fried bread, spicy beans and rice, and fish baking in banana leaves.

In some of the rooms she saw shrines to various Vadiana saints. The Blessed Ones—the gods that seemed to dominate the religious life of the island. They appeared to be an important part of everyday existence. And she supposed the people here hoped the saints could make their lives better.

A rattling sound made her fumble for the Mace she carried in her purse. Then she saw a skinny black cat slip from behind a trash can and prepare to streak across the alley.

They both stopped short. The cat had encountered her before and looked up hopefully.

“Here you go, sweetie.”

Instead of the Mace, she took out the plastic bag of dry cat food she'd started carrying with her and spilled some on the ground at the side of the alley. The cat waited until she moved away before starting to eat hungrily.

Feeding it was probably a useless gesture. There were thousands of stray cats on the island. But she'd decided to try and make life a little less miserable for some of them.

She'd come here last week on the invitation of Etienne Bertrand, who'd contacted her agent several months ago about booking her into his Sugar Cane Club in Palmiro.

At first the timing had seemed perfect. She'd thought the island represented escape, a place to relax during the day before going out to wow the customers at night.

But she'd been uncomfortable here since the first night she'd arrived. And not just because Bertrand turned out to be a giant of a man who served as his own bouncer.

She'd been on her own for ten years, and she was a pretty good judge of people. There was something “off” about Bertrand, but she didn't know what.

Or what, exactly, was going wrong in her personal universe. Everything had been fine until her engagement in Denver, when she felt like someone was watching her—getting closer. Getting ready to spring. Too bad the feeling was worse on Grand Fernandino.

She'd thought about breaking her contract, but she'd already discovered that Bertrand was well connected here. She was sure that if she tried to change her plane ticket, the island grapevine would inform him. And he could turn out to be more dangerous than whoever was following her.

“Stop it!” she muttered. Maybe nobody was following her. Maybe she just needed a long vacation after nine straight months on the road.

She sighed. Mostly, she'd been satisfied with the life she'd made for herself.

Now she couldn't shake the conviction that outside forces were messing with her destiny.

She reached the back door of the Sugar Cane Club. From the alley it looked like a dump, with peeling paint and smelly garbage cans lined up along the wall.

But she knew the front facade sported a bright green and yellow paint job, designed to attract the tourists who were the lifeblood of the island. Without the foreign currency, everybody here would be living at the poverty level.

She stepped inside, breathing in the smell of stale smoke and liquor. But it looked okay—unless you saw it with all the lights on.

The biggest point in its favor was that Bertrand was paying her more than she'd made in her Denver gig. And with the low cost of living down here, she could save some money while she was on Grand Fernandino.

After closing the door of her dressing room, she pulled off her lime green T-shirt, navy cropped pants, and tennis shoes, then quickly donned the black dress and strappy black high-heeled sandals she wore during her performance.

Methodically, she began applying makeup, accenting her blue eyes with beige and gray shadow, stroking some color over her high cheekbones, and making her upper lip as full as the bottom.

But she didn't spend too much time on her appearance. It wasn't the important part of her act. She could have looked like Grandma Moses and it wouldn't have mattered. In fact, sometimes she wished she could take on the disguise of an old lady—and hide behind it.

 

FAR
away from Grand Fernandino, in a former hunting lodge near Cumberland, Maryland, a man pushed his wheelchair away from the computer. Once he'd been named Jim Swift. He'd worked for an organization called the Crandall Consortium, and he'd been paid well for his skills at stalking human prey and killing with stunning efficiency. Always for a good cause, of course.

Now that he was homebound, he was reduced to sending others out to handle the vital job he ached to do himself.

In the endless hours of pain when he'd lain in the hospital burn unit, he'd come to understand that if he survived, he would start a new phase of his life. God or fate or whatever controlled the universe had spared him for a reason—given him a mission in life.

Twenty dead and more than two hundred to go. And every time he sent another one of the monsters to hell, he felt a profound sense of satisfaction.

He must get them all, before they destroyed the human race—the way they'd destroyed the Crandall Consortium.

He turned to stare out the window into the darkness, feeling the winter cold penetrate his now-fragile skin. All the way to his bones.

In his previous life, his home base had been a converted mansion on the bluffs above the Potomac River, where he'd worked for the powerful Kurt MacArthur.

Officially MacArthur had run a think tank with ties to Congress, the military, and the CIA. Unofficially, his consortium had taken on jobs no one else had wanted to touch—whether they were legal or not. Until one stupid decision had destroyed everything.

When their headquarters building had gone up in flames, Jim had been lucky to escape with his life. And lucky he had the connections to take on a new identity. Now he was Jim Stone. And nobody knew he had been the Crandall Consortium's most trusted operative.

Too bad MacArthur's secret records had been wiped out in the fire. If Jim had had a list of names, he could have proceeded more quickly. Instead, he was reduced to research—and probabilities. Which meant he might make the wrong call.

But he'd long ago decided that it was better to kill ten innocents by mistake than to allow the guilty to escape. Like in the Middle Ages, when some sinless women had been burned at the stake along with the witches.

The computer beeped, and he spun his wheelchair back to the desk. The message was from Bill Cody. Wild Bill. His operative on Grand Fernandino.

While Jim ran the message through the decoding program, he poured a cup of coffee, then sipped the Kona blend as he read the text.

By the time he was finished, he was 90 percent sure he would order a kill.

 

ZACH
waited for a horse-drawn carriage and a motorcycle to clear the intersection. Then he stepped onto the cobblestone street, careful not to get horse manure on his deck shoes as he crossed to the row of shops and bars across from the city square.

A rotund man standing next to four trained parrots on perches called to him.

“You wanna picture with Ozzie, Harriet, Ricky, and David?”

“No thanks,” he answered. He needed a drink, not a souvenir photograph.

He'd intended to go back to the
Blue Heron
as soon as possible. But the day after the diving mishap, he'd quickly found that his plan wasn't going to be so easy.

José and Claude had both been busy spreading the Pagor story, in the island patois. But the message was clear in any language—“stay away from that American, Zach Robinson. He'll get you on the wrong side of Pagor.”

So was this whole thing a setup? Had someone paid off José and Claude to make sure he couldn't hire anyone? And why? Had William Sanford been murdered? And the murderer didn't want the
Blue Heron
investigated?

He might have put José and Claude in the middle of a conspiracy—until he remembered the look of sheer terror in José's eyes. The man hadn't been faking his fear. He had been trying to escape the wrath of a supernatural being.

Unfortunately, since then, José had been talking about it to everyone who would listen.

With no other alternative, Zach had put in a call to his regular crew, but they couldn't get there for a couple of days. So he was stuck until they made it to the island.

Which was why he was looking for a dark, quiet place that matched his current mood, where he could have a few beers and silently curse the trio of José, Claude, and Pagor.

As he passed a nightclub painted a garish green and yellow, a publicity poster in a glass case stopped him in his tracks.

The top of the frame said, “Now Appearing at the Sugar Cane Club.” Below it, the picture showed a very attractive young woman with wavy dark hair that hung around her shoulders. She was holding a silver tray in one hand and stretching out her other hand toward him as though waiting for him to give her something. The caption at the bottom of the poster said, “Magic Anna: the woman who knows you better than you know yourself.”

His first thought was
that's ridiculous hype
. Yet he had always believed in magic, at least in some hidden corner of his soul.

Or he had wanted to believe. You could call it magic if you wanted. Or psychic talent. He wasn't sure which was the better term. He'd read dozens of books about people who were supposed to possess abilities denied to the likes of ordinary humanity.

Sometimes he'd felt like he was on the edge of possessing magic powers himself. He had fantastic intuition when it came to finding shipwrecks and other lost objects.

And yesterday afternoon, that sixth sense had made him whip out his hand and prevent José from shooting to the surface and killing himself.

But that was the extent of his talent. And maybe it hadn't been extrasensory perception that had helped him catch José. Maybe it had been a flash of movement at the corner of his vision.

His attention turned back to the woman who called herself Magic Anna. He liked her body, liked her slender waist, gently rounded hips, and high breasts.

He'd been drawn to her face, then deliberately focused on the rest of the package to give himself a little breathing room. Now he slowly raised his eyes. She looked to be a few years younger than he was. Her lips were sensual. Her nose was short and straight. But her eyes were her best feature, their blue depths fringed by dark lashes—a very attractive combination.

Yet he wasn't just staring at a good-looking woman. The longer he regarded her, the more he thought she really could look into his mind and…what?

Connect with him on a level he'd never experienced with any other human being? Even as the notion flitted through his mind, he stifled a laugh—and gave himself points for a vivid imagination. He thought he was going to find the thing he'd been looking for all his life in a nightclub in Palmiro?

Sure.

With a mental shrug, he walked down the block to a bar where the main activity was drinking.

 

A
soft knock at the door of her dressing room made Anna jump.

“Twenty minutes, sweetheart,” Bertrand called in his soft island accent.

She'd come to think of that accent as part of a disguise, along with his short-sleeved button-down shirts covered with tropical flowers. On the surface he seemed like a laidback dude—drifting along on an island breeze. In reality, he had the sharp teeth of a jungle cat.

When he walked away, she breathed out a little sigh.

From almost the moment she'd arrived in Palmiro, she'd known that Bertrand wanted something from her.

It had started with the long, speculative look he'd given her while they were waiting at the airport for her luggage to be unloaded. Although he hadn't made any moves on her, his hidden agenda added to her tension level.

So what was going on? Did he want her to read his palm? Did he think she could put him in touch with a dead relative—or a dead lover? If so, he was going to be disappointed. Because her powers were limited to what she did in her act. That was it.